A Gavin Newsom appointee signed off on new rules that let California's parole board review and potentially release inmates serving life without parole, and a lawsuit now challenges the move as an illegal end-run around voter-approved law.
On July 9, the California Office of Administrative Law approved a sweeping expansion of authority for the state's Board of Parole Hearings. The new administrative rules grant the parole board power to review sentences of inmates convicted of the most serious crimes in the state's penal code, including first-degree murder with special circumstances, and recommend their release, even when judges and juries ordered them locked up for the rest of their lives. Kenneth J. Pogue, the OAL director who approved the rules, was appointed by Governor Newsom in 2019.
The Board of Parole Hearings did not wait for the state legislature to act. It wrote the rules itself, creating a parallel system of reviews and hearings for life-without-parole inmates that mirrors the existing parole hearing process, the same process California voters moved to restrict in 2008 when they passed Marsy's Law.
Anne Marie Schubert, a former district attorney who now leads the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, has filed suit against the parole board. Her organization argues the board lacks legal authority to rewrite sentencing law through administrative regulation.
Schubert laid out the core legal challenge in blunt terms. She told Fox News:
"The main primary arguments deal with the fact that, one, they don't have the legal authority to do this, that this is an administrative bureaucratic agency that's trying to rewrite the legislature, that they're trying to rewrite sentencing laws that came out of ballot initiatives."
That last point carries particular weight. The sentencing laws at issue did not come from Sacramento backrooms. They came from the ballot box. California voters passed initiative statutes mandating life without parole as the minimum sentence for first-degree murder with special circumstances. Those same statutes forbid the striking of special circumstances, a safeguard designed to keep the worst offenders behind bars permanently.
Now a parole board has decided, on its own, that it can build a hearing system to override those voter-approved mandates. No new legislation. No public vote. Just new administrative rules, rubber-stamped by a governor's appointee.
Newsom himself faces growing legal and political pressure from multiple directions. An FBI probe has widened around his political orbit, and the governor has retreated from direct press scrutiny even as questions mount about decisions made under his watch.
Schubert did not speak in abstractions at her press conference. She described the kinds of cases the new rules would reach, and the families left to absorb the consequences.
"We had a family at our press conference of a 6-week-old that was tortured to death by her father over a weeklong period of time, all of which, what I understand, was on video, and so you talk about baby killers. We talk about mass shooters; there's a case out of Fresno that happened in the early '90s where a guy killed 10 people, and he pled to life without parole. He would potentially be eligible."
A father who killed a six-week-old infant. A mass shooter who killed ten people in Fresno and pleaded to life without parole. Under the parole board's new framework, both could be reviewed for release. The families who buried their loved ones under the guarantee of a permanent sentence would be dragged back into a hearing process they were promised would never exist.
The lawsuit's language drives the point home. It states that the board "has taken it upon itself to expand this recommendation authority into a full-blown system of reviews and hearings paralleling and resembling the system of parole hearings, the system that the people of California voted to curb in Marsy's Law, Proposition 9 of 2008, due to the prolonged suffering it imposes on crime victims and their families."
Marsy's Law passed because Californians recognized that repeated parole hearings inflict their own kind of harm. Victims' families were forced to relive the worst moments of their lives every time a killer came up for review. Voters chose to limit that cycle. The parole board's new rules would restart it, for a category of offenders voters specifically intended to exclude from the process altogether.
The parole board's move does not exist in a vacuum. California's criminal justice apparatus has spent years loosening the grip on serious offenders, often over the objections of victims, prosecutors, and voters.
Even the state's existing parole process has produced controversial outcomes. AP News reported that Lyle Menendez was recently denied parole for three years after a daylong hearing, one day after his brother Erik received the same result. Both brothers were rejected in part because of continued misbehavior behind bars, including unauthorized cellphone use as recently as March 2025. A psychologist had assessed Lyle Menendez at "very low" risk for violence, and he had zero violent incidents during his incarceration, yet commissioners still cited anti-social personality traits including deception and rule-breaking as grounds for denial.
Commissioner Julie Garland told Lyle Menendez directly: "We do understand that you had very little hope of being released for years. Citizens are expected to follow the rules whether or not there is some incentive to do so."
That case involved inmates whose life sentences were reduced by a judge, making them eligible for parole consideration through existing channels. The California parole board's new rules go further, they would create eligibility where none was ever supposed to exist, for offenders whose sentences were designed to be final.
The federal scrutiny already surrounding Newsom's political circle makes the timing all the more striking. A governor whose allies are under investigation is hardly in a position to reassure the public that his appointees are exercising sound judgment on matters of public safety.
Meanwhile, California courts continue to hand down serious sentences for violent crimes. A Los Angeles judge recently sentenced an actor to more than three decades in prison for stabbing his ex-girlfriend, a reminder that the state's judiciary still treats violent offenders with appropriate severity, even as administrative bodies work to undermine those outcomes from behind the scenes.
The legal complaint filed by Schubert and the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation draws a clear line. On one side stand California voters, who passed initiative statutes and Marsy's Law to ensure that the most dangerous offenders stayed locked up and that victims' families were spared the ordeal of endless parole hearings. On the other side stands an unelected administrative board that decided those voter-approved protections were optional.
The lawsuit states that the board "has extended this parallel system to include inmates convicted of first degree murder with special circumstances sentenced to life without parole, despite initiative statutes mandating life without parole as the minimum sentence for this crime and forbidding the striking of special circumstances."
That language is precise. The statutes do not merely suggest life without parole. They mandate it. They do not merely discourage the removal of special circumstances. They forbid it. The parole board's new rules attempt to accomplish through administrative procedure what California law explicitly prohibits.
No court has yet ruled on the lawsuit's merits. The parole board has not publicly responded to the legal challenge. But the question Schubert has placed before a judge is straightforward: can a state agency override the will of the voters through internal rulemaking, without legislative authorization?
The DOJ investigation into Newsom adds another layer of accountability questions for a governor whose administration keeps generating headlines for the wrong reasons.
Several critical questions remain open. The parole board has not explained why it believes it possesses the authority to create this hearing system without legislative action. Newsom's office has not addressed whether the governor was aware of or approved the rule change before Pogue's office signed off. No court has issued a stay or preliminary ruling on the lawsuit. And the full text of the new administrative rules has not been made public in the available reporting.
Scott Peterson, among other inmates sentenced to life without parole, has been cited as the type of offender who could potentially benefit from the board's expanded authority. Whether any specific inmates have already been scheduled for review under the new framework remains unclear.
California voters told their government exactly what they wanted: the worst offenders locked away permanently, and victims' families spared the cruelty of relitigation. An unelected board decided it knew better. Now a court will decide whether the voters' word still means anything in Sacramento.
